Understanding Near Death Experiences

people coming back

from near death experience after having been resuscitated from, say, cardiac arrest.

There was almost no literature in the field at all,

nothing really for you to relate your research to.

It's as if in the last 10 years things have changed drastically. That's right.

As I kept hearing from these patients who

had almost died and had had really dramatic experiences that had

profoundly altered their lives,

and yet I couldn't find anything in the psychiatric literature,

the psychiatric textbooks, the medical literature,

that could give me any clue as to

what was going on with these patients.

Why don't we, for the benefit of our viewers,

just outline what a typical near death experience would be like?

Well, a very typical pattern,

or something that the patients commonly tell us,

is that at this time when their heart stops beating, they have a cardiac arrest,

they have no heartbeat, no detectable respiration,

and very often their physicians will say something such as, oh, my God, he's dead,

we've lost him,

or something to that effect.

The patients will tell us that,

from their perspective, they feel more alive than ever.

They say they

float up out of their bodies and they watch the resuscitation going

on from a point of view immediately below the ceiling of the operating room or

the emergency room. And they say,

from this perspective, they can see exactly what's going on down below,

they can understand the remarks and the thoughts of the personnel,

the medical personnel who are around.

They say, after a time in this very unusual experience that they're having a great

deal of difficulty understanding, in effect, how can I be up here watching

me down there?

It doesn't seem to make any sense to them.

But after a while they realize that

although they can see clearly and understand perfectly what's going on,

no one seems to be able to see or to hear them.

So they undergo an experience in which they realize that this

is something to do with what we call death.

And at this point they experience

what we might characterize as a turning inward of the sense of identity.

One woman described this to me by saying, in this experience, at this point,

you are not the wife of your husband,

you are not the mother of your children,

you are not the child of your parents, you are totally and completely you.

Truly yourself. Truly yourself.

And at this point,

in this moment of isolation and realizing that this is what we call death,

then very unusual transcendental experiences begin to unfold.

And I call them transcendental partly because the patients say

that these later steps of the near death experience are absolutely ineffable.

That means indescribable.

And that try as they may, they can't find any words in the ordinary language that we

are exposed to to describe

the amazing feelings and experiences they are going through at this point.

Beautiful beyond words. Absolutely.

And they say they become aware of what's described as a tunnel,

a passageway, a portal, and they go into this tunnel.

And when they come out,

they come out into a very brilliant,

warm, loving, and accepting light.

And people at this point describe just amazing feelings of peace and comfort.

In this light, they say that relatives or friends of theirs

who seem already to have died,

who have already died, and seem to be there to meet them and to greet

them and to help them through this transition.

Another thing they'll often tell us is that at this point they are met by

some religious figure.

Christians say Christ.

Jews say God or an angel.

And they say in this setting that this being, in effect, asked them a question.

And they all say that words can't convey it,

that communication in this...

position does not take place through words, as you and I are now using,

but rather in the form of an immediate awareness.

And the way they summarize this question, or try to put it into words, is that they

say that he asked,

in effect, what have you done with your life? How have you learned to love?

And at this point, they say, they undergo

a detailed review of everything they have ever done in their lives.

This is displayed around them,

they'll tell us, in the form of a full color,

three dimensional panorama.

And it involves every detail of their life, they say, from the point of their birth

right up to the point of this close call with death.

And it might take only a matter of seconds in our time. Absolutely, Jeffrey.

And you know, the people who go through this say that time,

as you and I are experiencing it now, that's measured by the clock,

is not a factor in these experiences.

As if they're in a realm which has transcended time as we know it. Right.

Many of them say eternity is the word they will grasp at to

explain this.

Interestingly enough, during this life review,

the patients very often report that they

review the events of their lives not from the perspective they

have when they went through the event,

but rather from a third person perspective.

And their perspective is displaced out to the side or above, and they watch

themselves go through these life actions from a third person perspective,

from which, incidentally, they can also empathetically

relate to the people with whom they've interacted.

In other words, if some of their actions have caused pain in another person,

they feel that pain.

Absolutely. They take the perspective of the person that they have been unkind to.

And accordingly,

if they see an action where they have been loving to someone,

then they can feel the warmth and good feelings that that has resulted in in the

life of this person.

One thing that is fascinating is that all of the patients who go through this

tell us that there is one thing that comes up to them as the most

important feature in their life in these reviews.

They say that it

doesn't have anything to do with earthly success.

No one asks them about their financial well being or how much power they've had

or any of the other things that our society

suggests that we should be paying so much attention to.

Every single person has told me that what they

were faced with there was the question of how they had learned to love and whether

they had put this love into practice.